for those assets, what are the advantages of decentralization?
Lots of advantages in reliability and assurances. More fundamentally it obsoletes some functions of auditing and government along with the associated costs to society.
It automates many of the administrivia of corporation management.
If you have ever run a public company, the advantages are more immediately apparent.
the pt that i was getting at is that until Bitcoin fulfills Satoshi's visions as a generally accepted and large enough form of
currency or money, there will be no such trust or confidence given by the masses or larger financial institutions to embed asset derivatives into the blockchain as the "legal" ledger.
what will drive Bitcoins growth is a maintenance of its Sound Money function along with transactional growth which we are fortunately beginning to see w/o a doubt. once it becomes a generally accepted global and apolitical public good as money, then it might be used to embed more riskier assets within the blockchain as with CP.
otoh, the blockchain may only ever be applicable to Bitcoin as Money. in which case, all those speculative assets may just be bought and sold with BTC as they will become denominated as such with the records continuing to be maintained by those organizations responsible for enforcing those contracts.
if we use Bitcoin to win the Money Game, we win Everything. that is where the problem lies.
Yes Yes...
This is why I would like to see SPV side chains implemented on some altcoins.
In matters such as these, it is not as important to see how things work, as it is to see how they fail and under what circumstances.